Gennady Golovkin, the Smiling Champion

Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin—the Kazakh hero, nice man, and middleweight champion—has a tiny head. This is good. Tiny heads make for tiny targets. Golovkin’s head is shaped like Dracula’s coffin, with high cheek bones, a flat crown and a narrow chin. This is bad. Sharp cheek bones, it’s believed, are more likely to split the skin upon impact. All this is hypothetical, of course, but especially so for Golovkin, who, in twenty-nine professional fights, has yet to get hit with the sort of shot that might test boxing’s theories of tiny heads.

Much has been written about the unassuming smile that never leaves that tiny head. Boxing writer Michael Woods has suggested that Golovkin, who usually goes by the nickname G.G.G., add “The Grinning Assassin” to his list of aliases. After spending an afternoon with Golovkin last September, Deadspin’s Hamilton Nolan observed, “Golovkin always smiles. It’s a sort of knowing smile, though, a smile turned inward, stemming no doubt from the knowledge that he has plenty to say, but not necessarily the words to say it.” And Grantland’s Rafe Bartholomew, who once drove six hours to see a then-unknown Golovkin fight at a casino north of Utica, had this to say about the sight of a violent, smiling man: “Golovkin radiates a happy-go-lucky aura that contrasts with the mayhem he causes in the ring. He smiles and nods when he gets hit, lets out an occasional amused shrug after battering an opponent, and performs a dainty, ballet-inspired bow to the crowd after he wins.”

It’s true. Golovkin is a weird smiler. Unlike Sugar Ray Leonard, Golovkin does not put on a hard, smiling mask to cover up boundless ambition; unlike, well, name any boxer who has honestly assessed his life’s work, Golovkin does not smile with scorn or deep, existential irony. Instead, his smile reads goofy—whether he’s conducting a post-fight interview, struggling through his English platitudes, or stalking a terrified opponent around the ring, Golovkin betrays nothing but the bemusement of a wealthy exchange student on his first day of school.

None of this sounds like great TV, but since his first HBO date in September of 2012—a battering of Grzegorz Proksa, a well-regarded Polish fighter—Golovkin’s reputation for brutal knockouts and the enthusiasm of a small, but rabid Kazakh fan base in New York City, have turned him into one of boxing’s biggest draws. His knockout percentage, which stands at a staggering ninety per cent, has brought up the inevitable comparisons to Mike Tyson. As far as comparisons go, it’s a bad one. Despite a decorated amateur career that saw him win a silver medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics, Golovkin is far from Tyson’s technical equal. He does not move his head at all. His footwork is perfectly adequate, but not much more. His punching style, which, at times, looks like an aggrieved child poking at his mother’s side, should never bring up comparisons to Tyson’s compressed, violent hand speed. But Golovkin’s awkward, reaching punches, when they connect, can sometimes have a Tyson-like effect. The sturdy fighter Matthew Macklin got hit with a probing Golovkin liver shot in the third round of their fight last May and crumpled to the canvas and did not get up for several minutes. Three months prior to that, Golovkin knocked the Japanese middleweight Nobuhiro Ishida through the ropes with a right cross thrown from his tip-toes. There have been many others.

On the Wednesday before Golovkin’s fight with Australian middleweight Daniel Geale, the promotional cabals behind the fight held a sparsely attended press conference at the theatre in Madison Square Garden. A gathering of boxing writers huddled around Golovkin, who was seated at a small folding table. The questions were easy, as they always are in these situations. One reporter asked, “When do you know when you’ve really hurt a guy? Do you know in the first round?” Golovkin said the first round was too soon, but he usually knew by the second. “Who was your toughest opponent?” a writer asked. Golovkin smiled, almost apologetically. “No one,” he said and shrugged. When Golovkin’s English failed him, his trainer, Abel Sanchez, took over and delivered the sort of garrulous, quasi-technical doublespeak that has become the fight trainer’s second language, especially when addressing the media before a fight.

I first met Sanchez last year in the tunnels of the Barclays Center while reporting a profile on Don King. Sanchez’s other fighter of note, Tavoris Cloud—promoted by King— had just lost a decision to the forty-eight-year-old Bernard Hopkins. All cornermen and media had been kicked out of Cloud’s locker room while King negotiated the purse with his fighter. Sanchez and I began chatting about Big Bear, California, where he runs his training camps. Sanchez didn’t want to talk about Cloud, who had allowed Hopkins to mesmerize and frustrate him. He talked instead of Golovkin, and, when we finally parted ways, he handed me a Gennady Golovkin trading card that looked like it had been printed off a bubble jet printer. “That’s the real guy,” Sanchez told me. “I don’t think he can lose.”

He has not, but it’s worth asking how long the boxing public can watch an indestructible fighter tear through unremarkable opponents. Going into Saturday night’s fight against Daniel Geale, a tough former middleweight champion from Australia, the oddsmakers put Golovkin as a nine-to-one favorite. Let’s give the challenger his due and say that he has fought admirably in the past against more human competition, but there was only one real question among the reporters ringside at Madison Square Garden: When would Geale get knocked out?

The Golovkin crowd didn’t seem to care much about the competitive imbalance. If you want to see the entirety of an immigrant population in New York City in one place, give one of their countrymen a championship belt and have him fight in Madison Square Garden. According to the most recent census, there are twenty two thousand Kazakh immigrants in the United States. On Saturday night, it seemed like a third of the entire diaspora had a ticket for the fight. They cheered Golovkin during his ringwalk; they cheered when he dropped his robe, revealing a pair of lacquered white trunks that looked like they had been dipped in melted Storm Trooper helmet; they cheered whenever a Kazakh flag showed up on the Jumbotron. And while their enthusiasm matched the crowds who show up for Miguel Cotto, Manny Pacquiao, and Canelo Alvarez, numbers are numbers and no one seems to know whether there are enough Kazakh fans to sustain Golovkin’s growing popularity. Without the support of network television or a broad fan base, fight cards now rely heavily on demographic research. Meaning, it helps to have a whole lot of countrymen willing to shell out sixty-five dollars to watch you on pay-per-view.

Still, the fight went mostly according to script, except for one odd moment in the first round when a ringside cameraman tripped Geale, who went sprawling back on his ass. In retrospect, he should have stayed down. For reasons unknown, a minute was added onto the clock, a fact lost on many at ringside, who collectively held their breath as Golovkin stalked Geale around the ring. When Geale went down in the second round, Woods turned to me and another writer and asked, “Are you guys cringing, too? Whenever Geale goes to the ropes, it’s cringe time.”

We all cringed for about nine minutes of ring time. Faced with a skittish but skilled boxer, Golovkin’s extensive amateur background showed up in his feints. There’s a move he goes to quite a bit, where, hands-down, he ducks his head and shoulders to the side and half-commits to a jab. Then, when the scared opponent reflexively crunches over to protect his head from the second half of a one-two, Golovkin will instead bang the flank with a heavy body shot. Geale must have watched this move countless times during his preparation (a collection of these shots shifted around Macklin’s bowels), but a frightened fighter can’t control his reflexes and time and time again, Geale fell for Golovkin’s feints and paid a heavy price.

It finally ended with about thirty seconds left in the third. Geale landed his best right cross of the fight while Golovkin was loading up a big right. Rather than letting the punch to the face deter him, Golovkin’s right arm kept on moving up. Once his face, just smashed, had rearranged itself into something resembling its normal shape, the brain told the still-swinging fist to clobber Geale’s head and so it did. There was a moment in the slow motion replay shown on the Jumbotron where one can see Golovkin’s brain and arm reconnecting their circuitry—the face sets, the chin tightens, the arm straightens out and accelerates and Geale goes down.

After the fight, I walked out onto Eighth Avenue into a throng of Golovkin fans. A white BMW convertible shot up Thirty-first street, honking its horn. A woman in the backseat hoisted the Kazakh flag over her head. I followed the car to the corner of Seventh Avenue, where a kid who looked like he had just gotten off a long shift at a nearby sandwich shop, asked, “What flag is that?”